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| Elizabeth Peratrovich from the Alaska State Archives |
What was the first anti-discrimination act in the US?
When did it pass, where, and who pushed for it? Why? And how?
Find the answers to these basic questions of journalism--who, what, when where, why, and how--by reading the obituary of Elizabeth Peratrovich, published in the New York Times today, sixty plus years after she died.
The NYT has a great new feature, Overlooked, publishing obits of people who were not well known enough to rate one when they died. Many of these unsung heroes are women.
Elizabeth and her husband Roy were each the child of a Tlingit mother and a Caucasian father.
In 1941 in Douglas, Alaska Territory, they saw a sign on a hotel reading "No Natives Allowed."
They wrote a letter to Governor Ernest Gruening and began activism to get an anti-discrimination bill through the Territorial Legislature.
The bill met great opposition.
"Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?" asked Senator Alan Shattuck in 1945.
But the bill passed, largely because of an impassioned defense by Elizabeth Peratrovich, who cited injustices that she and her family had experienced.
Nearly twenty years would pass before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be passed in the lower 48.
Her biography, Fighter in Velvet Gloves, was published this year by her son, Roy Peratrovich Jr.
If you see a new $1 coin in 2020 with her likeness on it, now you will know why.
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